At times Hechts dramatic lyrics
armored in biblical allusions remind one of the diction and vehemence of [Robert] Lowell
("These yes, which many have praised as gay, / Are the stale jellies of lust in which
Adam sinned"). But in poems that dramatize the hard hours of his generations
history, Hecht speaks with a tragic irony that is his own unmistakeable voice. "More
Light! More Light! plays out against the implications of Goethes dying cry two
episodes from history: the burning at the stake of an accused heretic in the Middle Ages,
and this:

[Hoffman quotes the two stanzas before the last.]

In the absence of the light of either Goethes humanism or the
Word, the Poles refusal may suggest that he, like their Nazi captor, is too scornful
of Jews to kill them himself. As for them, "Much casual death had drained their souls
away," and they obey the order to bury the Pole. But then the Nazi makes them dig him
out and get back in. The gravity of Hechts quatrains molds this fable of
"casual death" as unassuageable, without transcendence.

In the ethical cosmology of The Hard Hours
there is little room for heroism. Think of the parable of the Pole and the two Jews
in "More Light! More Light!" It serves as the books most bracing example
 and it is an example  of the way that "casual death" drains
away the soul and barbarism dehumanizes its victims. Those victims are not even permitted
a "pitiful dignity." The language of the poem is steady and neutral, even
documentary, the outrage distanced, the riveting story told without much commentary:

[Hirsch quotes the poem]

In this bleak twentieth century exemplum, heroism is unrewarded and
suffering is neither redemptive nor tracendental. It doesnt signify. The Pole acts
humanely (and without any sign higher than his own conscience) and yet he suffers a death
as slow and brutal as that of his victims, the Jews who have already lost their souls and
now lose their lives, too. The dehumanization is complete  even the guard is
metonymically identified only as his "Luger." There are no mourners or saviors
in this poem. There is only the relentless stripping certainty of the death camps. And the
eventual passing of time. The Goethean ideal of light has been replaced by the banal
darkness of evil. Humanism, like the Age of Reason  is effectively over.

From Edward Hirsch, "Comedy and Hardship," in Sydney Lea, ed.,
The Burdens of Formality: Essays on the Poetry of Anthony Hecht (Athens: U of
Georgia P, 1989), 57-58.

Peter Sacks

"More Light! More Light!" enacts the multiplication of historical agony . . .
and it does so within a repetitive structure of commands whose totalitarian rigor becomes
yet another image of fate itself. The strict quatrains with their ballad rhyme-scheme
reinforce this by their allusion to narratives of unavoidable fatality. And once again,
the poem has a ritual quality, for it describes savage ceremonies of execution and
entombment, the last of which even involves a grotesque kind of game. As the German
officer orders the Pole to bury the two Jews alive, then reverses the order after the
Poles refusal only to reverse it yet again and finally to kill all three, he is
degrading their very desire for survival. And the poem itself plays against our desire
that at least someone survive the transaction. We become horribly implicated in this poem,
beyond merely wondering "what would we have done?" For if we are somehow
made to witness the events, we also survive themin the company of the only other
survivor, the Nazi killer. It is this manner in which Hecht has trapped himself and his
readers within the uncanny association of narrator-observer, survivor, and killer that
most thoroughly seals the darkness of the poem and enforces the most despairing vision of
the relation between poetry and the bearing of historical witness.

This time, there is no question of prayer. In the earlier execution, centuries ago, the
spectators prayed for the victim's soul, their prayers more than ironized as the dying man
"howled for the Kindly Light." In the later scene "No prayers or incense
rose up" as the Pole lay bleeding to death. In a literal sense within the poem there
were no witnesses (least of all, God!); or if we have been somehow
"present," the unavailability of any offered forms of response leaves us
arrested in a frozen silence so mute as to render us almost absent. Perhaps this is the
ghostly position most of us occupy in relation to the historical events around us. If we
resist association with the killer, perhaps in our muteness we should recognize our
similarity to the only final attendants on the corpse: "every day came mute / Ghosts
from the ovens, sifting through crisp air, / And settled upon his eyes in a black
soot."

Anthony Hecht's frequently anthologized "'More Light! More Light!'" is not
simply a poem about a terrible event in World War II, but a meditation on the nature of
evil. Those critics, such as Daniel Hoffman and Edward Hirsch, who largely ignore the
first three stanzas of the poem also ignore Hecht's insistence on the importance of a
poem's architecture:

I prefer the work that is decidedly more architectural, in which parts balance one
another, and in which everything is essential, so that if something is removed or
misplaced, the whole thing collapses, as would be the case with a large building.
(McClatchy 185)

The first three stanzas of Hecht's poem place the reader in the sixteenth-century Tower
of London, where a man protesting his innocence is being burned at the stake, probably as
a heretic or a traitor. His executioners attempt to give him a quick and merciful death by
throwing a sack of gunpowder into the fire, but when the powder fails to ignite they can
only pray for his soul as he howls in agony. Though not a specific figure, the victim
evokes such men as the Protestant martyrs Nicholas Ridley and High Latimer, whose last
words before being burned to death in 1555 were, "Be of good comfort, Master Ridley,
and play the man: we shall this day light such a candle by God's grace in England as I
trust shall never be put out" (Ann Hoffman 294).

The second part of the poem describes an actual incident from World War II: a Pole
first refuses and then obeys an order to bury two Jews alive (Kogon 96-97). The incident
took place at Buchenwald, a few miles from "the shrine at Weimar," the home of
Goethe, whose dying words provide the title for the poem.

While some critics, such as Ashley Brown and Peter Sacks, recognize the greater horror
of the second death, others misread the poem's judgment. Alicia Ostriker understands the
poem as teaching that human cruelty and atrocity are the same through the ages:
"there is nothing new under the sun" (99). Norman German reads the phrase,
"And that was but one, and by no means one of the worst" as a comment by the
executioners in the Tower, arguing that it proves their "absence of compassion in the
face of extreme anguish" (129). Critical response to the Pole's act is also mixed. In
a short but perceptive commentary on the second half of the poem, Edward Hirsch recognizes
the Pole's "impossible purity of action," his humane gesture based only upon his
own conscience (58-59). Daniel Hoffman, on the other hand, goes so far as to suggest that
"the Pole's refusal may suggest that he, like their Nazi captor, is too scornful of
Jews to kill them himself" (44).

Despite these critics, the poem makes a clear judgment: the second death is much worse
than the first. It says of the death in the Tower, "And that was but one, and by no
means one of the worst." The deaths in the woods are among the worst because they
lack the first death's ritual of law and prayer and its "pitiful dignity."
Painful though the death in the Tower is, the executioners believe in what they are doing,
follow the rule of law, try (if unsuccessfully) to be merciful, pray for the man's soul.
The German soldier, on the other hand, is gratuitously cruel, playing mind games, forcing
the Pole to deny his own heroism, destroying souls as well as bodies.

The poem uses formal devices to expand its explicit judgment. It condemns the German
soldier by its amazing use of metonymy and the passive voice. The soldier is a void, to be
inferred only from a Luger and its glove and a riding boot. Unlike the executioners in the
Tower, who pray, the soldier never acts. The Pole and the Jews are, rather, the recipients
of actions expressed in the passive voice ("are there commanded," "are
ordered," "to . . . be buried," "was ordered," "was
exposed," "was shot").

On the other hand, the poem creates the Pole's heroism by the rhythm of the poetic
line, especially by the force of the climactic short sentence which comes after the only
emphatic caesura in the poem: "But he did refuse." Despite the lack of either
human or divine light, the Pole refuses the initial order, surely heroism of a very high
kind. After he has been buried and dug out, however, there is "no light, no light in
the blue Polish eye." He has lost both the divine light that sustained men like
Latimer and Ridley, and the humanistic light that Goethe epitomizes. Like the Jews whose
souls have been "drained away," and the men in Auden's "The Shield of
Achilles," who "died as men before their bodies died," the Pole is
destroyed by his experience, his eyes finally blinded by the ghosts from the ovens.

We misread "'More Light! More Light!'" if we make it too small, only the
story of an event, no matter how striking. The poem, which is dedicated to Hannah Arendt,
the author of Origins of Totalitarianism, and her husband Heinrich Blucher, does
not simply tell a story. It judges the Nazi soldier and the system that created him. Hecht
condemns not merely the infliction of pain but the destruction of the person - both victim
and executioner It is that destruction that makes the deaths in the German wood so much
worse than the fiery death in the Tower.

In "More Light, More Light!" and "Rites and Ceremonies," two poems
from The Hard Hours (1968) that deal directly with the consequences of the Shoah,
Hecht's lyric voice is neither that of the objective historian nor the subjectively
striving voice of individual expression; somewhere in between, Hecht's speakers are both
lecteurs describing events in history and individual personas implicated in the traumatic
history unfolding before them. Like the narrator of "Behold the Lilies of the
Field," who in a dream is "made to watch" the torture of the emperor
Valerian, Hecht's Holocaust poems share a state of what Peter Sacks calls "enforced
witnessing," that of an individual who is impelled, for reasons reaching beyond his
own comprehension, to stare at and perhaps make sense of atrocity. Yet Hecht does not
restrict his historical view to the Shoah alone; both of the poems I consider here connect
the atrocities of the Nazis to persecutions farther back in history. Indeed, Hecht's sense
of continuity and repetition in history, closely connected to the much-remarked-on
formalism of his poetry, distinguishes him from most of the other poets treated in this
chapter (and from most American writers of the Holocaust). Hecht's poems provide a
particularly useful test-case for the problematics of lyric and the Holocaust, for Hecht
seems in many ways the prototypical poet's poet, one who places a high esteem on the
aesthetic properties of poetry. Yet his poems avoid a merely solipsistic subjectivism;
they insist instead that the lyric is historical, that aesthetics need not mean an escape
from history but instead are very much implicated in history, yet still capable of
providing insight into it

"More Light! More Light!", whose title comes from the words attributed to
Goethe at his death, juxtaposes two events: the execution of a heretic in the Middle Ages
and the live burial of three Jews "outside a German wood" in wartime. Hecht's
voice in the poem is level and somewhat detached but clearly present, unlike the
consciousness of Reznikoff's poems. The poem in fact begins in a clipped style that elides
the identity of the implied pronoun referred to in the first quatrain:

Composed in the Tower before his execution
These moving verses, and being brought at that time
Painfully to the stake, submitted, declaring thus:
"I implore my God to witness that I have made no crime." (64).

The identifying "he" appears in the next line, but the reader has already
been jarred by the sudden immersion into the description of an execution bereft of
historical context or identifiable personage. The next stanza describes the grisly nature
of the primitive execution. While I do not quite agree with Edward Hirsch's assertion that
the tone of the poem is "documentary," certainly some linessuch as the
followingattain an extremely prosaic and descriptive quality: "Nor was he
forsaken of courage, but the death was horrible, /The sack of gunpowder failing to
ignite" (the words "horrible" and "sack" deflating the more
elevated diction of "forsaken of courage"). Similarly, the later scene, "In
which the two Jews are ordered to lie down /And be buried alive by the third, who
is a Pole," is notable for its lack of outward outrage or commentary (64). The
largely twelve-syllable or longer lines allow Hecht to achieve this slightly more prosaic
level of utterance while still maintaining a sense of gravity; the more regular pattern of
pentameter would lend the quatrains a too-restricting formality, potentially emphasizing
the aesthetics over the subject matter.

One of the most striking moments of the poem is the transition from the earlier
historical atrocity to the more recent one, unambiguously signalled by the single
sentence, "We move now to outside a German wood" (64). The voice here is that
perhaps of the history teacher, briskly and unapologetically moving his class from one
example to the next. Yet if it is a history teacher, the presumed guide offers no critical
apparatus, no commentary, no explanation for the specific choice of these two examples.
Why does Hecht intrude with this strange stage direction? It seems to me a necessary
moment in the poem. The objective tone of the poem is only a fiction, of course, and this
line reminds the reader that a "we" does existthat the poem is not simply
a recital of two possibly analogous historical episodes, but presumes a compact between
the poet and his readers, a potential for ethical judgment beyond the pointedly
non-ethical confines of the poem's narrated action.

The scene in the German wood constitutes a total upheaval of normative expectations.
The upheaval consists not merely in the pointlessly cruel command (as in most of
Reznikoffs Holocaust)to bury the Jews alive, but in the Pole's
refusal at first to commit the act, followed by the Jews' apparent willingness to do so
after "He was ordered to change places with the Jews." "Much casual death
had drained away their souls," Hecht writes, apparently accounting for the Jews'
action here, and the episode concludes inevitably with the German's reversal of the
command once again, and the Pole's carrying out of the murder this time, only to be shot
to death himself.

The poem ends with the grotesque image of the Pole's eyes being covered with ashes from
the crematoria, continuing the imagery of light, eyes, and sightlessness that appears
throughout the poem:

No prayers or incense rose up in those hours
Which grew to be years, and every day came mute
Ghosts from the ovens, sifting through crisp air,
And settled upon his eyes in a black soot. (65)

The shutting off of the Pole's vision with the remains of Jewish victims might be taken
as a statement about the Pole's blindness to the humanity of the Jews he has helped kill,
a blindness already suggested in the line, "No light, no light in the blue Polish
eye" (64). But the Pole nevertheless seems a strange figure to make an example of,
for he seems almost as much a victim himself as an oppressor. Where is the German
(referred to, as Hirsch points out, only metonymically as a "Luger") in all
this? And how is the reader to make sense of the movement from the execution of the
heretic in the first three stanzas to the more fully narrated murder of the last five?

Peter Sacks suggests that "We become horribly implicated in this poem, beyond
merely wondering 'what would we have done?' For if we are somehow made to witness the
events, we also survive themin the company of the only other survivor, the Nazi
killer." (91) Yet such a reading of the poem makes central the liminal figure of the
German, rather than the Pole who receives most of the attention. (Indeed, it is the Jews
who seem the least recognizable figures in the poem, referred to only impersonally and in
the plural, perhaps already close to death.) We still must ask why Hecht asks us to
identify with the perpetrators here.

One must return, I think, to the title and its implications about the desire or need
for light, from Goethe's perspective not simply the literal light that means one is living
but the metaphorical light of humanism, enlightenment, moral awakening. And here the
connection between the two historical episodes becomes clearer. For it is not a simple
analogy that Hecht draws between religious persecution in two different eras (indeed, even
the parallel of religious persecution is tenuous, for Jewish belief washardly
an issue for the Nazis, as it was for the Christian inquisitors), but an analogy marked by
a significant divergence related to the question of light. For the religious sufferer of
the first part, the "Kindly Light" exists as a possibility; the
"tranquility" of his soul may be imagined in the face of his torture only
because "the name of Christ" still carries that power.

In the latter event, however, light has been thoroughly extinguished. The repetitions
of "Not light" and "Nor light" that begin lines 16 and 17, and the
phrase "No light, no light" (negatively echoing Goethe's cry) in line 24
establish figuratively what is borne out in the action narrated: that for all parties
involved in the Holocaust, any notion of a redeeming light must be dismissed. To the
contrary, the poem can be viewed as a repudiation of Goethe's idealistic hope; his Germany
has produced the very opposite of the light he so fervently desired. The utter
dehumanization of Pole, German, and Jew in this poem attests to a determinedly
non-redemptive historical reading on the part of Hecht. Moreover, the poem puts into
question the reader's own ability to "see" the events being transcribed. To what
extent, the poem challenges us, has our own line of vision been stripped of any capacity
to witness atrocity in a compassionate way? From this angle, the Pole may indeed be the
appropriate analogue for the American reader, for both nationalities have been called
"bystanders" to the Holocaust. The ostensible exculpability of being a
bystander, however, is severely undermined when associated with the actions of the
Poleor, more broadly, the many European bystanders who through inaction allowed mass
murder to occur. The rigor of Hecht's formal skill does not aestheticize pain in this
poem; it does, however, place into tension the restraining qualities of the formal
arrangement and the chaotic and violent subject matter bubbling beneath. The simplicity of
the form here works in the poem's favor, producing a dynamic tension without calling
attention to itself.